Archive: Category: TechPresident

Transparency Matters The 2016 presidential campaign is looking more and more like a return to pre-Watergate days of money in politics, with several candidates--John Ellis (Jeb) Bush, Scott Walker, Rick Santorum and Martin O'Malley--deliberately delaying even the announcement of their "testing the waters" phase of campaigning (which comes with contribution limits and disclosure requirements), even though they are obviously already swimming deep in the waters, drawing a formal legal complaint filed at the FEC by two campaign finance watchdog groups, as Eric Lichtblau reports for the New York Times. Now, as Ed O'Keefe and Matea Gold report for the Washington Post, Bush endorsing the creation of a new group that will collect unlimited amounts of money in secret on his behalf even...

Waking Up Hillary Clinton's deleted emails may be recoverable, computer forensics experts tell Joseph Marks and Rachael Bade of Politico. Her attorney David Kendall has declined a request from Benghazi committee chairman Rep. Trey Gowdy (R-SC) to turn her server over to an independent third party, saying that it was pointless because the records were deleted. Many of the members of the House Appropriations Committee in charge of overseeing the FBI and its director, James Comey, and his proposals for requiring flaws be built into encryption tools, openly admit they know nothing about encryption, The Intercept's Glenn Greenwald points out. Google's senior VP for communication and policy, Rachel Whetstone, literally uses a laughing baby gif to take News Corporation's Rupert Murdoch down a...

Clueless Responding to calls by Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff and other tech leaders to boycott Indiana because of new legislation permitting discrimination against gay couples, progressive blogger Melissa McEwan, founder and manager of the Shakesville group blog, argues in Model View Culture that what the state actually needs if it is to become more progressive is more, not less, investment by progressive tech leaders. She writes, as resident of the state: The idea that we need more pressure in order to be moved to do something is absurd. People on the precipice don’t have the luxury of principled resistance….The truth is, progressives with resources have been boycotting Indiana for decades. That’s actually why we’re in this situation. If you want to know...

Net Effects Responding to the skepticism expressed by GOP campaign strategist Alex Lundry about Hillary Clinton's reported plan to hire 1000-plus digital staff, Ethan Roeder, the data director for the Obama 2012 campaign emailed me to respond with, well, data. He writes: "2012 numbers - 260 digital staff, 117 data, about 50 analytics and 50 tech. That's close to 500. In 2008 you could literally fit our analytics and tech teams together in a closet. Total staffing across these departments was in the ballpark of 200. Compare that to 500 staff in 2012 and it's not hard to imagine a team of 1,000 in 2016." The Clinton campaign is plotting a kind of "listening tour" to reintroduce her to the American people,...

Data-Driven Hillary Clinton's digital team comes into full focus in Darren Samuelson's detailed report in Politico. In addition to Obama alum Teddy Goff as chief digital strategist, the campaign is hiring Katie Dowd as digital director, Jenna Lowenstein as a digital deputy, BlueLabs Elan Kriegel (who ran state battleground analytics for Obama in 2012) as analytics director, Matt Ortega as communication-digital connector and Andrew Bleeker as a top outside adviser. The new name in that mix, Matt Ortega, for those who need a refresher, is really good at making timely and funny microsites poking fun at the opposition (recall 2012's EtchASketchMittromney.com, MultipleChoiceMitt.com and NotAnotherTexasgovernor.com). Samuelson also reports that Clinton "is building a New York-based campaign that senior party operatives say could ultimately...

Too Much Information Brave new media ecology: If you read just one article on the implications of the reported deal between Facebook and The New York Times (as well as a few other marquee publishers) to move the latter's content onto the former's platform, read this warning from veteran tech observer and entrepreneur John Battelle. OK, you can also read this one by Robinson Meyer of the Atlantic, imagining Facebook as the "Walmart of News." On NiemanLab, Joshua Benton does a good job of explaining what this means for everyone else--particular media makers mulling their own jump to distributed content models. There's always podcast and email newsletters (like this one!)--two channels that no one controls access to. Closer to confirmed: Philip Rucker reports...

Firsts So the first new-fangled tech tool to make it into a bona fide presidential campaign story wasn't Meerkat, it was Yik Yak. Turns out some of the reporters in attendance for Senator Ted Cruz's big announcement speech at Liberty University used some of the app's localized anonymous comments to pep up their stories on Cruz's launch, reports Chris Thompson for Poynter. The first lawsuits against the FCC's net neutrality regulations have been filed, reports Brian Fung for the Washington Post. Facebook wants to host news content on its own servers, and it looks like The New York Times, BuzzFeed and National Geographic will be initial partners in its effort, report Ravi Somaiya, Mike Isaac and Vindu Goel for the New York Times....

Cowed Texas Senator Ted Cruz is officially running for president, announcing via Twitter at midnight last night. Meanwhile, there appears to be something amiss with TedCruz.com. Noticing that presidential candidate John Ellis (Jeb) Bush and Dan Balz, the Washington Post reporter, are both Meerkating, Politico media reporter Dylan Byers hyperventilates and says that "today, or maybe yesterday, is the day that Meerkat officially became the social media tool of the 2016 election." Matt Browner-Hamlin, a veteran of the Chris Dodd 2008 presidential campaign, gently reminds Dan Pfeiffer--he of the "Meerkat is going to revolutionize 2016" view--that live-streaming "isn't new to American politics." Back in 2007, he notes, "[We] used UStream to live stream anywhere from one to three speeches and Q&A sessions...

Checking The US threatened to stop sharing intelligence information with Germany if the country offered asylum to NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden, the country's vice chancellor said this week, reports Glenn Greenwald for The Intercept. The Republican presidential candidates all pretty much follow each other on Twitter, this graphic from Bloomberg Politics shows. A new study by Philly Political Media Watch, a project funded by the Democracy Fund and the Rita Allen Foundation and led by the Internet Archive, found that the ratio of political advertising time to political news stories on Philadelphia TV stations (which took in a combined $14 million from political advertisers) was 45:1 in the last weeks leading up to the 2014 election. In case you missed that: forty-five to...

Complications It's Sunshine Week: After I chided Jason Ross Arnold for his on-the-one-hand, on-the-other-hand review of the Obama administration's transparency record in Tuesday's First POST ("spoken like a true academic," I wrote), he good-naturedly emailed me and offered the full text of his review, which was abridged in the Washington Post. Here it is, published yesterday on techPresident. I take back my jab at academics. Notably, Arnold pulls no punches in saying the Obama administration "will not serve as the model for the most transparent administration yet to come." The AP's Ted Bridis reports that the Obama administration has set a record for censoring or denying access to files requested under the Freedom of Information Act. On the other hand: New White...